Across the US bikes are big. So is bike theft, especially in the Bay Area. Now police in San Francisco are using every tool - high and low tech - to stop thieves from stealing bikes. Officer Matt Friedman of the SFPD's Anti-Bicycle Theft Unit gave me a tour of his operation from the GPS equipped "bait bikes" to his Twitter feed of bike locking tips and convicted bike thieves.

"People ask me if we are out of the recession and my answer to them is come and answer the phones at Catholic Charities for a day," says Belinda Marquez who runs one of the few social services in California’s sprawling Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles. Long seen as an affordable place live out the American dream, the Inland Empire has recently struggled with high poverty rates.

This video is part of The New York Times series "Caught in Poverty" on the the 50th Anniversary of the War on Poverty.

With little regulation, Oklahoma City has become an e-cigarette boomtown where “vapers” flock to vapor shops to buy the smoking alternative products, which include nicotine liquids. One purveyor calls his city the "wild west" of vape.